At TIFF 2025, Alex discusses Alice Winocour’s film Couture on the podcast, starring Angelia Jolie, and how it fits into Winocour’s body of work about traumatized bodies, outsiders, and backstage stories.
Women Directors
In honour of #52filmsbywomen, we've collected all of our reviews of films directed by women and interviews with female directors all in one place.
Ep. 181 Between Dreams and Hope and queer and trans survival (TIFF 2025)
At TIFF 2025, Alex discusses the Iranian film Between Dreams and Hope about a trans man seeking gender affirming care, and connects this to other recent international films about the legal and medical barriers for the queer right to exist.
The best acquisition titles at TIFF 2025 (updating throughout the festival)
From Iran’s Between Dreams and Hope to Argentina’s The Currents to Canada’s Meadowlarks, here are the best acquisition titles (films still seeking distribution in Canada, the US, and/or the UK) at TIFF 2025
Ep. 179 What if we told stories about women beyond their love lives?
Rewatching Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) sparked this podcast where Alex Heeney asks: What happens when women’s stories aren’t built around who they end up with?
Ep. 176 Materialists (dir. Celine Song)
On the podcast, Alex Heeney takes a close look at Celine Song’s film Materialists, which poses the question: Is love enough when money is tight? Alex digs into the film’s strengths and weaknesses.
Ep. 175 How three very different films ended up in conversation
Join me (Alex Heeney) on a journey through three films I programmed inside Reel Ruminators — a British political thriller, an Indigenous Canadian documentary, and a queer South African drama — and discover how their contrasts help to illuminate each other.